It feels like the plan has always been to price the working class off the roads, with no alternative beyond walking or cycling.

But if so, they underestimated how much this could cripple economies.

When you've got the elite/ruling-class flying in to climate conferences on dozens of private jets, it's clear who isn't going to modify their lifestyle for the sake of the environment.

EVs will remain luxuries for the relatively wealthy. You need a spacious home with a garage or at least a driveway if you want to charge at home. No luck if you're in an apartment. And there's still no sign of serious efforts to build charging infrastructure on a 'for the masses' scale, despite bans on new ICE cars planned for less than a decade from now.

(If we get to the point of fully-autonomous self-driving taxis being a thing - they'll be owned in bulk by the super-rich and their corporations, not by regular individuals. It'll probably be illegal for a regular citizen to operate such a service, even when the tech is ubiquitous)

> It feels like the plan has always been to price the working class off the roads, with no alternative beyond walking or cycling.

But why? How does it benefit them? The "oil companies lobbying in the US to make car-free lifestyle difficult" conspiracy makes sense because it benefits them, but how does it benefit the elite in europe to "price the working class off the roads, with no alternative beyond walking or cycling"?

Crowd the working class into cities while you retreat to your private mountain or estate in the country? Keep all the icky poors away from your sight?

that... doesn't make any sense in 21st century at all, no matter how I look into it. I get it, people are pissed off, envious etc. but lets have some rational discussion and not just spit class hate left and right because it feels good (or whatever motivation is there)

If you want to 'save the planet' by massively reducing road travel, you need to relocate the masses into very dense cities, places where public transport can work, where life without cars is practical.

As an added bonus, they're all now crammed into tiny apartments that don't require much carbon emission to heat or cool, and where they don't have space for many physical possessions (less consumption of physical resources, more spend/profits on digital/virtual products)

Meanwhile, the elite can have even more massive rural estates, and drive their luxury EVs on a near-empty road network to and from their private jets.

The problem comes when all the forced-city-dwellers want to escape their urban prison at the weekends... With real travel unaffordable if not outright prohibited, I guess that'll be where the 'metaverse' comes in?...

Ideologies are driving forces.

There doesn’t have to be a reason why someone believes in it.

>And there's still no sign of serious efforts to build charging infrastructure on a 'for the masses' scale

It's not enough but there are 2,000 EV charging stations installed in the EU every week. 10,000 would be better but we're not even one order of magnitude off the target.

I'm also skeptical of the business model for public EV charging.

I forsee a huge bait+switch, with sky-high prices once enough people have invested in an EV and are dependent on the service, and once the charging service providers have built up local monopolies on public charging.

It's hard to have a predatory monopoly on something anyone can produce directly from something as widely available as sunlight. This isn't finite black gold pumped from select regions of the globe, transported and refined with substantial large-scale hazards at every step.

If charging station prices skyrocketed, competition would appear overnight with chargers popping up in every available parking space until the prices stabilized at something reasonable enough for sustaining the industry at a FMV.

Sorry, this just empirically isn't true. Tesla raised supercharging prices 50% overnight without a whimper in my country, while another EV charging chain raised AC rates 100% just because they can. Two years later, neither of them went bankrupt as a result, nor did any competition undercut them

In theory, anyone can open a new charging station. Also, in theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice - they are not. In the real world, economies of scale and supply chain limitations basically guarantee an outcome of oligopolies coalescing into a silent cartel, each of them happily milking their 5-10% margins without any desire to rock the boat.

I don't understand how one can empirically observe this when EVs haven't yet become the dominant vehicle on the road.

Tesla's are rather niche, as a percentage of vehicles on the road it's insignificant. There's not enough demand yet. Tesla drivers are still largely well-heeled early adopters of a luxury brand, of course they're going to be exploited.

It’s not a luxury brand. It is a high tech brand with a few luxury features. I bought a Tesla as a frugal move to save money in the long run, not to spend more, and so far it’s working.

The up front investment is higher but the long term costs are lower. If you think in purely purchase money terms you can trick yourself to think a Yugo or Skoda or Yaris or Leaf etc. is cheaper, but I factor in safety and fun, so my calculation differs.

They can raise prices all they want. Right now, they are just affecting the “rich people who have EVs” and not us “normal people”. I never knew the prices increased and not did I care. Still don’t, actually. But if I was affected, I would probably do something about it because I do care about keeping my costs low.

Enforcement of the monopolies may well be regulatory or contractual.

If a big retail chain does a deal with one company to provide a number of chargers in each of its car parks, the contract will likely prohibit the use of other providers to install more charging points.

Who ever gets in first can most likely ensure they control the vast majority of the car parks in the local area - all the major retailers and apartment complexes. They'll probably offer to install chargers for free so long as they get to bill for the power.

Once demand is high enough, they don't need a perfect monopoly, if the dominant company has a plentiful supply of chargers and the cheaper competitor only has a few and there's constant queues for them.

> It's hard to have a predatory monopoly on something anyone can produce directly from something as widely available as sunlight.

And who will give you a permission to build your own infrastructure to generate electricity on top of your apartment building?

Would you be in favor of charging infrastructure being run as a public utility?

That's probably a better option.

It won't be long before there's heavy taxes on EV charging, to make up for the lost fuel tax revenue. Were're not going to escape governments taking their cut, but if we can prevent a big slice of the revenue from going directly into private pockets, that'd be a good thing.

Governments pay for roads with fuel taxes, vehicle registration fees, and general tax revenue since the first two are not enough. Delaware gets 80% cost recovery through user fees, while Alaska brings up the rear at 20%. How we pay for roads is a political choice.

Some states are adding punitive EV and hybrid registration fees that are equivalent to a fuel tax paid for a 13 MPG truck. They provide the justification that fuel tax needs to be fully replaced, EVs are heavier vehicles causing more road wear, and since EV owners are wealthier on average it's a progressive tax.

> And there's still no sign of serious efforts to build charging infrastructure on a 'for the masses' scale, despite bans on new ICE cars planned for less than a decade from now.

Amsterdam has decent public charging infra. The best (and having biggest quantity) in Europe even. Heck even the Netherlands in its whole on its own accounts for most of the public charging points in Europe. Finding a public charing point is entirely possible in Amsterdam even though still a nuisance sometimes.

But go outside Amsterdam and the situation deteriorates exponentially. Outside Amsterdam I don't count on being able to charge most of the time. I went to a vacation park last month and they had one charging point for the entire park, with no alternative in a radius of 20 km. Outside the Netherlands I don't count on being able to charge at all.

This is a huge failure in foresight.

> It feels like the plan has always been to price the working class off the roads, with no alternative beyond walking or cycling.

"Just use slow, crowded, unsafe and inefficient public transit" "Don't worry about me, I have to be chauffeured around, security reasons you know!"

"Just give away your guns. You don't need them for protection, you and your kids will be safe with the police" "Me? Oh it's different. See I need theses armed bodyguards with me. For security reasons you know!"

Europe is pretty diverse.

Many European countries have efficient public transit. Some allow firearms. One territory even has mandatory open carry.

Where might you be from?

No, many European cities have efficient public transit. Sometimes they have great inter-city rail services too.

Public transport is never likely to be effective in more rural areas, though.

I think GP is pointing out hypocrisy.

> When you've got the elite/ruling-class flying in to climate conferences on dozens of private jets, it's clear who isn't going to modify their lifestyle for the sake of the environment.

Private Jets Set to Escape Higher EU Energy Taxes - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-09/private-j...

We had two Teslas for a year in an apartment with no charging on site. It worked just fine. Your assumption that it won’t work is mistaken.

On the other hand, I would agree it would be better and easier with on-site charging. But it wasn’t bad at all.

If this comment was any more American it'd be eating apple pie while cleaning out the barrel of an AR-15.

"Pricing the working class off the roads and onto the sidewalk" is the sort of thing that Europeans don't really worry about, because their cities are actually built for pedestrian traffic first and cars second. American cities are built for cars first, and pedestrian traffic if you feel like death from being thrown fifty feet in the air is a good way to go. Furthermore, Europeans already pay way more for gas than we do, and this is politically allowable because most people do not drive to work in Europe. EVs are popular in America because it's the easy quick bandaid fix to the fact that making the entire population drive a powered personal vehicle to work is an environmental nightmare. Europe has trains and buses that work.

Totally agree about self-driving taxis; but again, that's an American solution to an American problem for the same reasons I mentioned above.

The real problem for Europe is going to be the coming winter. Forget pricing the poors off the roads, how about pricing the poors out of a warm home? Most of Europe's home heating gas came from Russia pre-war. And while Nordstream was very much a geopolitical bad idea, there weren't very many better options to get cheap gas into the region. In fact, this is exactly what Putin is banking on, and much of Russia's prior acts of aggression can be better understood as "what can we do to ensure we have a monopoly on European gas imports and pipelines?".

It's also a mistake to look at elites and assume they hate their population purely because they are failing them. The underlying problem is not that they are feckless dictators, it's that they have no good options. If, a decade and change ago, Germany had said no to Russian gas in response to, say, the invasion of Georgia; whoever made that decision would have been punished by being voted out for having taken away the cheap gas from people. You'd have yellow-vest protests all over the Union, and then the whole EU would sheepishly walk back to Russia and beg for the gas pipeline to be turned back on. This is the same reason why the EU has found it difficult to actually fully transition to renewables or low-carbon energy[0], and America has found it outright impossible.

In fact, I'm not entirely convinced that we won't see yellow-vests all over France[1] this winter. Petrostates have the uncanny ability to survive and evade sanctions, because their people do not have the luxury of deposing elites that fail them, and resource wealth is highly fungible. If you want to see elites that truly hate their poors, look at any country whose wealth comes out of the ground instead of from the people. In contrast, elites in democratic countries are, well, democratically accountable for any policy they implement that harms the people - even if that policy is otherwise a good idea.

[0] i.e. renewables plus nuclear; though the history of nuclear power in Europe has it's own problems

[1] Insert the appropriate cultural equivalent for your EU member state here

“Whatever fossil fuels exist in the continent”

That’d be coal. Which Europe produces some of, but was importing from Russia until a few months ago. In general, it is not like Europe has a big pile of practically exploitable-in-reasonable-time fossil fuels that it isn’t using.

Yeah, even if we had enough coal, we would need something like coal liquefaction in massive scale to at least somewhat replace russian gas and oil - can't use a (ICE) car or a gas burner with coal briquettes or coal powered electricity.

There's also Dutch natural gas, but they've been limiting production due to seismic stability concerns.

To be fair, if we leaned in on nuclear we'd be oil free. I'd much rather deal with highly concentrated nuclear waste than CO2 & Methane emissions

Maybe if we had leaned in on nuclear 40-50 years ago. (Even then, Uranium does not grow on trees). But right now, that's not a viable option for the next thirty years. Industrial and Regulatory challenges are impossible to overcome in the timeframe that's needed.

The USGS has identified US thorium reserves that could meet the WORLD's energy for the next 138 years. I hope in 200 years when or if we run out of nuclear energy that we've managed to find alternative energy sources or leverage space mining.

https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1336/pdf/C1336.pdf

Another reference for thorium salt reactors: https://www.thmsr.com/en/the-thorium-molten-salt-reactor/

> To be fair, if we leaned in on nuclear we'd be oil free

no one knows that -- you think that Exxon and crew are ready to sit down ? They fired their Dutch CEO for trying to make the transition almost twenty years ago IIR

As others in this thread say -- this change reveals the struggles between giants, not the quarrels of simple people in media that happens daily

Renewables are the only way that Europe will be somewhat independent in terms of energy in the forseeable future (though hardly emissions free). The technology is already there, we've just been sitting on our asses for two decades instead of pursuing it aggressively.

The number of installed wind turbines in Germany has stagnated, for example. Output has increased, but that's because of repowering old installations. NIMBY rules and incredibly complex approval procedures prevent growth.

You'd think this would be all the motivation required to rapidly expand renewables. Evidently not, we'll just keep having the same conversation. Whatever.

Yes this is ridiculous. The Netherlands has been pretty good at expanding residential solar, but apparently the electric grid operators have been sitting on their asses for years, and so now we have too much solar because the grid can't handle the solar power during peak sunny days in summer.

It's like they plan nothing and just let things grow organically, which causes lots of issues and is inefficient.

The technology is not there for the grid to handle a whole bunch of excess solar energy during peak sunny days. We just don't have options for energy storage on the scale required. The usual approach of groups pushing for this is to handwave the problem away and call for more subsidies on domestic solar, which is of course popular with the public because it means money for them and punts the incredibly expensive and difficult part until later for someone else to deal with.

This isn't even about storage. This is just about having thick enough electric cables so that the grid doesn't overload. Right now the grid fails even if there are consumers for all that power. We're failing to transport the power.

Residential solar is very different to regular solar though. Grids weren't designed to aggregate lots of tiny feeds from people's houses, and it makes sense not to over-build that ahead of demand because in many cases the maths don't really work out except via subsidies, which can be here today, gone tomorrow.

The technology is there, it's called demand response. Air conditioning and refrigeration are major workloads at the peak of summer, and can easily absorb any "excess" supply at a moment's notice. The heat capacity of whatever is being actively cooled then acts as your "battery".

Among many other things. We should have started figuring out this stuff -- and implementing it -- twenty years ago. Such a missed opportunity.

All the easy sites for wind turbines have already been developed. Incremental wind turbine in new sites will be exponentially harder to get approved/accepted. If you don't see the development of wind turbins in the last two decades as a massive undertaking then doubling the install base will definitely be let alone tripling or more. This will be very inflationary especially because there is already a huge labor shortage for people servicing wind turbines.

I don't know about easy, but there are plenty of good sites left if you don't have a blanket ban of around a mile around every hamlet. And it'd help if the approval procedures for new construction wouldn't drag on for years and years.

These things aren't part of the physical environment, they're political realities. Are they fixable? I doubt it, like I said above, if people haven't got it by now, they never will. In the long run, Germany doesn't matter anyway, that's the good news.

> In the long run, Germany doesn't matter anyway, that's the good news.

I think this is VERY wrong if you believe in the severeness of (man made) climate change. It does indeed not matter as a share of emissions but if developed countries can not pull it off in a profitable way (or at least without loosing too much prosperity) the no other countries will follow (unless the WEF archieves to assemble their authoritarian super power to force everyone to comply)